Cosmic Love, 10/4/19 - 11/10/19, at Drawing Rooms

by Bruce Halpin
10/21/19

Cosmic Love, curated by Anne Trauben at Drawing Rooms, presents seven contemporary artists' consideration of the spiritual as it applies to their work. Spirituality is part of the artistic practice of nearly every culture. In fact, in many cultures it is the only subject of their artistic activity and is intrinsic to cultural production. Spirituality accompanies much of the discourse of Modernism from the Suprematists through Duchamp, Barnett Newman and beyond. The seven artists presented here each take a personal approach to the subject of the Spiritual.

Jill Scipione

Jill Scipione 

In the case of Jill Scipione, whose work is hung throughout the entrance hallway, as well as the entry gallery, the focus is on nature, specifically trees, as a repository of the divine. The woven bands, which comprise Ms. Scipione’s installation, had been previously tied around the trunks of trees which are slated to be cut down in Bayonne’s Morris Park. Ms. Scipione intends her work to serve both as elegy and a call to action to stop such unconsidered and unnecessary destruction of these quiet souls. It also serves as a rebuke to wanton and rapacious urban development. 

Sky Kim

Sky Kim’s complex and painstakingly executed watercolors reflect the meditative state in which they were created and are intended to promote a similar state in the viewer. They are beautiful in a profound way-their effect is part enchantment and part encounter with the sublime. They suggest a cosmos which serves to draw the viewer into a deep reflection on time and being. 

Bill Stamos

Like Ms. Kim, Bill Stamos’ investigation of the sublime is intended to impart a meditative state. It is, however, created spontaneously with a large degree of improvisation. Stamos’ keen sense of color and light is at the service of a transcendent beauty contained entirely in his work; his shamanistic approach to mark-making creates a coherent chaos. 

Mollie Thonneson

Mollie Thonneson’s “Poseidon Adventure” creates a submerged world of contemplation. Her installation, consisting of sewn together recycled lingerie and fabric remnants, is intended as an extended consideration of feminine sexuality. Through the formal exercise of color, design, and pattern, Ms. Thonneson imparts a sense of playfulness when combined with her titles, lending her work a subtle ironic humor. 

Maggie Ens

Maggie Ens’ large construct takes up an entire wall in gallery two and dominates the room. Detritus of post-industrial production is both medium and subject and is both an indictment of such, as well as a somewhat playful commentary. The installation threatens to overwhelm the viewer, but the humor displayed in her choice of components keeps it from being oppressive. A video opposite the installation shows the artist in the act of creating a similar installation. 

James Pustorino

James Pustorino’s drawing appears to be a diagram of some chaotic process which is on the quantum or cosmic scale. Mr. Pustorino’s title “Invisible Eye Overseeing the Sea” gives no clue to its subject and demonstrates a non-rational approach to mark-making. It’s like some Mad Professor’s drawing intended to explain the inexplicable, inviting the viewer down a, particularly colorful rabbit hole. 

Anne Trauben

Anne Trauben

This brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation to the work of Anne Trauben in gallery one. Composed of ceramic, paper and lights, her installation suggests a cosmos perhaps in the process of formation. Although presented as an installation, the artist intends each element as a discreet work and agreeable to any and all permutations. Ms. Trauben's work combines dynamism with an undeniable delicacy, thus instilling the viewer with a sense of awe combined with whimsey. In this work, the viewer's internal reality becomes interchangeable with external reality, a concept central to alchemy, as well as many other mystical traditions.

Cosmic Love continues through October 11 at Drawing Rooms 926 Newark Avenue Jersey City. The exhibit features drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and fiber art by artists Anne Trauben, Bill Stamos, James Pustorino, Jill Scipione, Maggie Ens, Mollie Thonneson and Sky Kim. Cosmic Love is curated by Anne Trauben.

Bruce Halpin is an artist living in Jersey City. Read Bruce's bio here and view his artwork here.

Cosmic Love, 10/4/19 - 11/10/19, at Drawing Rooms, published in Jersey City Times

by Tris McCall
10/18/19

Cosmic Love 3 by Bill Stamos

The shape of the cosmos is curved.  Its lines are soft, its dimensions are mutable, and its character is defiantly feminine. That’s the message — one of them, anyway — of the Cosmic Love show at Drawing Rooms in the Topps Industrial Building at the western tail end of Newark Avenue. Nothing about this uncommonly welcoming group exhibition feels rigid or cold: These seven artists might have their minds on the distant skies, but their collective version of space is nothing like a void.

And if that sounds a little hippie-ish to you, well, yes, Cosmic Love is as eager to embrace the viewer as any flower child might be. This is an exhibition that greets visitors with cloth vines bearing bright fiber blossoms. The piece grows out of the main space and penetrates the entry hall, and Jill Scipione, the fabricator of these flowers, does intend to get you knotted up and drawn toward the rest of the show. But the exhibition that waits within — one that covers a substantial amount of ground despite its modest size — isn’t particularly starry-eyed or blissed out. Many of these works radiate impermanence. As Douglas Adams (and countless physicists) assured us, the universe is a big, daunting, overwhelming place to navigate.

Two large works on paper by Bill Stamos grapple with this sense of immensity: Cosmic Love and Cosmic Love 3 greet the visitor to Drawing Rooms with twin slices of night sky. Technically, these are abstractions — colored streaks and constellations of glitter set against deep black backgrounds. Non-figurative though they may be, they definitely suggest astral phenomena; stare at them for a while, and they may lift you well beyond the roof of the factory.

Paintings from the deft brush of Sky Kim simultaneously evoke the grand and the microscopic. Her watercolors are so precisely rendered that they take on the meticulous quality of pen-and-ink drawings. Two works in her “Multiverse Series” hang on the southern wall of the main room — one may put you in mind of star charts, the other of furry, anemone-like undersea animals. Spheres, circles, and curves recur throughout the exhibit: Across from Kim’s illustrations of jeweled discs and hairy balls is a wall installation by Anne Trauben that includes clusters of round objects (including lightbulbs) in a steady and sinuous progression. Across from the Stamos pieces, a raft of Scipione’s cloth roses — the same kind that beckon visitors in the hallway — are arranged in a colorful clutch. It’s a humble, terrestrial counterpoint to the rest of the art in the show, and its tactility is a foretaste of the show’s wild, wigged-out centerpiece.

Untitled by Sky Kim

Save a colorful scrawl by Jim Pustorino in pencil and paint, the second of the two Drawing Rooms is devoted to fiber art. Mollie Thonneson‘s strips of fabric and torn and repurposed bras underscore the pervasive femininity of Cosmic Love — the sense of the universe as a kind of vast womb, dark, mysterious but ultimately self contained and nurturing — but these pieces are upstaged by GYPSY KOOMBYEYAH, a massive tangle of colored thread, wire, torn sheets, hula hoops, and hidden nests for found objects. (This includes Spiderman himself, who peers out from a perch within the web.) Maggie Ens, the creator of this installation, strung it high across the back wall, where it hangs like a net waiting to fall on the unwary. Like all of Ens’s work, it’s chaotic but deeply warm: It feels like a ball of yarn any curious cat could get pleasantly tangled in, and it rewards close engagement.

“GYPSY KOOMBYEYAH” is, indisputably, the Big Bang of this show.  But this star plays well with its supporting cast.  Ens’s view of the cosmos as a bright and bewildering net of associations and connections — one that contains joy and confusion in equal measure — one that’s shared in varying degrees by the other artists in Cosmic Love. The installation by Ens is big and bossy enough and contains enough fissile material to shine some golden light on everything else in the exhibition. These days, the cosmos is often imagined as an airless, unyielding place; this show is a pleasant reminder that it just might possess a beating heart.

Cosmic Love is on display until November 10th at Drawing Rooms, Topps Industrial Building, 926 Newark Ave, Thursday and Friday, 5-8p, Saturday and Sunday, 1-6p.

Tris McCall is a writer living in Jersey City. Read Tris's bio here.

Cosmic Love by Tris McCall for Jersey City Times October 18, 2019.

Just Beneath the Surface, 7/11/19 - 8/11/19, at Drawing Rooms

Touching the Void 

by Peter Delman

First, this show is the color of photography— black and white photography.

Jeri Coppola, Me Without My Shadow

Second, unusual in a visual art show, the featured sense is touch over sight. The hand of the artist, literally, is everywhere. A very long arm and hand are animated by fluorescent light in Jeri Coppola’s Me Without My Shadow, wrapped in a translucent skin of hand-made paper. 

Lee Arnold, The Swim

In Lee Arnold’s The Swim, a pair of hands sweep through the bubbling sea, capturing the tactile quality of the water. As befitting a show titled Just Beneath the Surface, the submerged swimmer periodically comes up for air and glides through the choppy wavelets. 

Katrina Bellow, Hawak/Hold (Kai)

Katrina Bello draws handfuls of water, but the flesh itself has disappeared, with only the shape of the water defining the cupped hand. 

Caroline Burton, Incarnation 31

The textural surface of found afghans, fabric sacks, and rabbit fur are printed or transferred onto canvas, hydrocal, or bronze in Caroline Burton’s work.

Much of the work is a high-wire act juggling the ephemeral and the physical. 

Jeri Coppola, Listen, I Have Told You Everything

The delicate gray photographic images in Coppola’s work are often battered with industrial sealant and paired with wood and wire flotsam scavenged from under a sawhorse. 

Caroline Burton, Figure 1p

Burton’s rabbit fur is far from fluffy. It looks like the remnants of an ancient bogman’s pet — or dinner—preserved in bronze.

Memory is a touchstone for these artists. The memories here are often wrapped in an enigma. 

Katrina Bello, Hawak/Hold (8.832, -124.5085)

Bello’s charcoal meditations on the Pacific Ocean focus on the eddies that swirl water from below to the surface. The eddies and the vast ocean itself may be seen as a metaphor for the memories of her experience of migration from the Philippines, and her subsequent family narrative. 

Caroline Burton, Incarnation 2

Burton’s Incarnation 2 suggests a looming barrier from a child’s eye view—The Tower of Babel perhaps, or fittingly, a stairway to heaven. 

Lee Arnold, Stereo

Stereo, originally shot in super 8mm film by Arnold, pairs unassuming, graceful images of travels in Europe with the blurred “memory” of the same shots reduced to mild gray shapes nearing the vanishing point.

The deft orchestration of this exhibition by curator Anne Trauben leaves room for interpretation by the viewer but consistently brings us back to common ground. In Stereo, a panoramic shot of high divers breaking the surface of water is followed by a seal gliding just under the surface and then playfully emerging from below. In other work, the reference may be nuanced, but we are invited to consider the surface represented and the significance of what is to be discovered beneath.

This work contemplates empty places, often with a sense of understated spirituality, as distinct from religion or faith. Touring the exhibition might be seen as visiting points on a roadmap to the sublime, reminiscent of the intention of Hudson River School artists in the nineteenth century. The artists often rely on their sense of touch in order to consider the void.

This show aspires to a state of grace and sometimes rises to the level of Baudelaire’s definition of beauty, “a spark between something fleeting and something timeless”. 

Lee Arnold, Walpurgis Nacht

Exhibit A is Arnold’s video Walpurgis Nacht in which alpen peaks, the place where Thomas Mann wrote Magic Mountain, seem to breathe clouds of mist. I half expected Caspar David Friedrich to emerge from the fog. The show’s monochromatic austerity can be intoxicating. When you leave the exhibit, the red brick warehouses and chirpy blue July sky may seem a touch trashy by comparison.

Just Beneath the Surface, 7/11/19 - 8/11/19, featuring works by Katrina Bello, Caroline Burton, Lee Arnold and Geri Coppola is curated by Anne Trauben.

Peter Delman is an artist living in Jersey City. Read Peter's bio here and view his artwork here.

Let Me Tell You a Story, 5/23/19 - 6/23/19, at Drawing Rooms

by Peter Delman

 

Racial identity and gender identity are underlying themes in the exhibition "Let Me Tell You A Story". But to leave it at that would be to miss a great deal. For these artists, identity is a platform from which are launched many journeys of discovery. A pivotal moment or break from tradition is often the key element in their origin stories.

For Abebunmi Gbadebo, the break was a total rejection of traditional art materials because of their association with Whiteness. She says, “My material is human hair from people of the African Diaspora. Our hair is so connected to our culture, politics, and history. It is history, DNA". Ibou Ndoye’s work builds on the tradition of Senegalese glass painting to create his personal folklore. It was when he literally broke the glass he was working on and reassembled the shards that he achieved a new level of energy in his work.

Theda Sandiford’s art is, in a sense, a soap box from which her voice can be clearly heard in a culture where too often she feels that "I am disappeared. My opinion, my ‘hand’, is dismissed outright". Shoshanna Weinberger’s work is rooted in her outsider status as a woman "considered ‘exotic’ in America and ‘not Jamaican-enough’ in Kingston". She channels the Carrie Mae Weems trope of “otherness doing otherness things” to generate jarring images of fragmented female identity. The male gaze that dismantles the bodies of women, and specifically black women, in a macho body shop of the mind, is the subject of Kimberly Becoat’s Urban Hottentot Series.

The Drawing Rooms gallery itself has embarked on a journey to develop a new identity. In the first major curated exhibition in its handsome new space, curator Anne Trauben offers a thoughtful, provocative experience for viewers. A major goal for the gallery is to encourage connections between regional art communities. This exhibition, for example, includes artists Gbadebo and Weinberger, based in Newark, and Becoat, in Brooklyn. Ndoye and Sandiford from Jersey City round out the roster.

The stories these artists tell are often unflinchingly critical of the racial stereotypes and fragmentation of gender identity ubiquitous in our cultural narrative. The exploitation and denigration of the female body represented in Becoat’s work refers to the story of Sara Baartman, who in the early 19^th century was paraded around Europe because her supposedly distorted body profile was considered an example of racial barbarity. She was known as the “Hottentot Venus". “Hottentot” itself was a derogatory slang term invented by the Dutch settlers of South Africa.

This demeaning objectification of black women is not limited to the history books. In recent years, cultural icons such as Grace Jones and Venus and Serena Williams have been subjected to demeaning characterizations of their bodies.

Kimberly Becoat, Hottent Harvest, collage

In Becoat’s collages, Tootsie Roll Pops and Bit-O-Honey replace female heads. In Hottent Harvest, some figures grasp small fetish-like figures – one of these shelters under a cantilevered butt bearing the legend “SEE MOON OFFER ON.” All this presumably for the delectations of the only head with eyes to see – a white man with an ironic flower in his mouth – suggestive of a serial killer’s calling card.

Shoshanna Weinberger: Triptych left to right: My Midnight Pink Emerging, Between Atmospheres and Bloodlines, Side Part, ink and collage on paper

Much of Weinberger’s work addresses similarly haunted terrain. In her 2012 solo show What Makes My Hottentot so Hot, and in many of her paintings, she confronts the grotesque and sexualized result of taking the “male gaze” to its darkest logical conclusion. The two works in this show are kinder, gentler meditations on identity – still the pink lips in her triptych are a real “punch in the mouth”.                                                                         

 

Theda Sandiford:
Neon Auto Tune – Limited Edition, 
digital collage on metallic photo paper

Lush lips feature, too, in Sandiford’s “Big Mouth” series. The lips are emblematic of her conscious act to embrace the power of her own voice. In Stay Woke, she deploys an arsenal of collage materials to build a whimsical self-portrait. Her two digital collages shimmer with rivulets of color and graphic energy. Neon Auto Tune – Limited Edition puts in mind the view from the bridge of a starship accelerating into hyper-space.

There are also links between Sandiford’s muscular rope sculptures and Gbadebo’s hair sculptures. Both artists work with community members to create these pieces. Gbadebo writes, “My art stores have become local barbershops and people’s homes. Every piece is made by my community. Strangers trust me to give a new purpose to their hair.” Sandiford is displaying her community-made fiber sculptures here for the first time. The hair braiding ritual is also the subject of one of Ndoye’s paintings.

 

Adebunmi Gbadebo:
Am I Still Dreadful, human hair

Gbadebo’s pieces combine the soft and the powerful like a cloud in a thunderstorm. The rippling form of Am I Still Dreadful, evoking a hair shirt and the golden fleece, commands its space on the wall with nobility. Untitled 15 is like a rope or a chain that can be seen as a reminder of oppression, but oppression overcome by the strength of individual discovery and the positive bonds forged by communities.

Weinberger writes, “The work explores my experience with ‘invisible blackness,’ ‘passing,’ and ‘Double-Consciousness’…anonymous portraits or headshots, alluding to my personal relationship with intersectional-identity, alienation and otherness". In One Pink Sunset Among My Midnight Selfies, the barely discernible images in the black frames may represent the virtually invisible aspects of the artist that are overshadowed by the selfie mask. Or perhaps they conjure the under-told story of the many women struggling in the shadows, unrecognized.

In Ndoye’s monumental paintings, the theme of community is strong and vibrant. Women often play leading roles, and the gestures of the figures are affirming and evoke trust and hope. But there are hints of sorrow too in the many unsmiling faces, and all the figures look away as if distracted by some unseen concern.

Ibou Ndoye:
The Arrival of the Fisherman,
painting on canvas

The Arrival of the Fisherman is the most joyful of the paintings. The background grid is alive with fish. The figures lift their arms in exaltation. A fishing boat is held aloft. The collaged fabric patterns, the vigorous background designs, and the demonstrative gestures of the people describe a moment of peace and plenty.

Currently running in Chelsea is a Robert Longo show that lights the way for making forceful, biting political art. The five artists in this exhibition are on this path, with their strong statements on gender, racial identity, and the restorative power of community.

Let Me Tell You a Story, 5/23/19 - 6/23/19, features works by Adebunmi Ghabedo, Shoshanna Weinberger, Theda Sandiford, Ibou Ndoye and Kimberly Becoat, is curated by Anne Trauben.

Peter Delman is an artist living in Jersey City. Read Peter's bio here and view his artwork here.